We have reached 100 episodes of The Email Marketing Show! Whoop! To celebrate we (Rob and Kennedy) have recorded a very special behind-the-scenes episode – a week in the life here at Email Marketing Heroes. 

We talk about what we do on Sundays (Kennedy), Mondays, and Wednesdays, how we build our campaigns, how we write our daily emails… and how Kennedy puts his underpants on in the morning. You really don't want to miss this one… 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(3:15) The team at Email Marketing Heroes. 
(7:06) Should you make time for email marketing?
(9:20) A Sunday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes. 
(11:08) A Monday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes.
(18:15) Email Marketing Wednesday!!!
(20:54) What about our daily emails?
(25:58) Batching, batching, batching.
(31:42) Email marketing is the one activity that will grow your business!
(35:15) Did Rob and Kennedy really record this whole episode naked? 
(36:40) Subject line of the week. 

The team at Email Marketing Heroes

If you're new to the show, welcome. We are Rob and Kennedy, we run The Email Marketing Show and an awesome membership called The League of Email Marketing Heroes. Rob and Kennedy (and some of our staff) are based in the North East of England and have a remote team with members from all over the world, including India and Columbia. 

We are currently making mid-6 figures a year and might even be able to hit a million soon. But we don't say this to brag (honestly!) For us, how much we make is a measurement of how many people we can spread the word to about this really good email marketing stuff!

Should you make time for email marketing?  

As we take you behind the scenes of our working week, you'll see just how much time we spend on email marketing. And you might think: “Of course you guys spend time on email marketing. You teach the stuff!” And you'd be right in thinking that.

But the real reason why we spend a lot of time on email marketing is because our business would dry up if we didn't. You see, 90% of our sales come from email marketing, so we couldn't afford not to do it. It's not a question of having time for us – in fact, we don't have time not to do it.

And in our opinion, neither do you! As Rob always says, if you're not spending time on email marketing, what else are you spending it on? Are we all inventing stuff that we could be doing in order to feel like we're being productive and getting loads done? Does what you do every day really move the needle in your business? Our tip is to focus on the activities that make you sales – and that's always going to be email. 

With email, you can make sales now but also setting up sales for the future. And that's how your business is going to grow. So focus on building systems in your business that will make you sales both now and in the future.

And with that out of the way, let's look into our week…

A Sunday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes

Believe it or not, our working week starts on a Sunday, which is when Kennedy will spend a couple of hours looking at our social media channels, including our Instagram, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators Facebook Group, and our Facebook page and, in one sitting, plan the content we are going to be sharing. Kennedy will typically record around 6 videos and create a whole bunch of graphics or brief them to our awesome designer Parul. 

And the reason why he chooses to do it on a Sunday is that during the week we are focused on supporting our staff on Slack. On a Sunday, the team is off, so Kennedy can get in his creative zone. Plus, he finds that weekends are the best times to come up with new ideas!

A Monday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes

Monday marks the official start of the week here at Email Marketing Heroes. Our staff check in every morning and check out every single evening, depending on what time zone they are in the world and how many hours they work. 

If we have something specific or an idea we want to discuss, we (Rob and Kennedy) typically get together for a call on a Monday to talk strategy. The cool thing is – we're completely flexible with this. We value flexibility and freedom to be able to do the things we want when we want and wherever we want. But if we need a call, we'll make that happen. Otherwise, we'll just keep an eye on whatever is coming around the corner to avoid anything ever becoming urgent or critical.

A Wednesday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes

Hang on a sec. What about Tuesday? Well, we actually don't do much work in this business on a Tuesday – or a Thursday or Friday for that matter! We can make exceptions, of course, so if there's a meeting we've been trying to make happen that can only take place on one of those days, we'll go ahead with it. But we have our own take on meetings – we'll only book one if there's a specific purpose to it. 

Wednesday on the other hand is a very important day… because it's Email Marketing Wednesday!!! And that's when – on the first Wednesday of every month – we record this podcast. We are able to attract some really big-name people in the world of online digital marketing, and when we let our guests know we only record one day a month, we've hardly ever had any pushbacks. 

But we definitely intensify our work on a Wednesday. We also do content creation, live events inside our membership, The League, and record training. We dedicate Wednesdays to email marketing because this allows us to think about it all day – about all the different email marketing strategies we can share with other people and how to best reach out and teach them. It's definitely an intense experience. But once all the podcast episodes are recorded, for example, we can pass on the activities to other members of our team to carry with their own separate tasks and make things happen simultaneously without us getting involved. 

What about our daily emails? 

This is where we truly live in the moment every single day, for the most part. As most of you know, we send an email every single day to our list – 365 days a year. There are obviously some other emails that get sent to people to our members or our customers, but in terms of our general list, the email we send daily are written live, in the moment. Or sometimes, they were written into our email marketing platform up to a maximum of 4 hours before, if we're doing a split test. 

Rob writes most of the emails, and on a Friday, he might want to write the Saturday and Sunday emails too, if he wants to take the days off. But not always. Because it typically only takes a whole of 10 minutes to get the email written and queued up and sent, so not long at all!

Our email campaigns

The only exception to that is that every 4-6 weeks we run a new campaign that replaces our daily emails. And those emails are usually pre-written. There's no chance we'd do an email campaign live – those have a lot of moving parts, and you might risk sending the wrong emails to the wrong segments and confusing people. So running an automation and then testing it is a lot more secure. 

Every 6-8 weeks we come up with a new way of promoting our membership, The League, which is our main product. We try and promote it from different angles because not everyone buys it for the same reasons. And we teach our members to do the same exact thing with their email marketing and products. You'll get better results from running different campaigns every 4-6 weeks to stimulate people in new and interesting ways.

When we're coming up with a new campaign, the process normally starts on a Monday when we might have a strategy call and plan the campaign out. We go through the idea and talk about ways of making it more interesting and appealing to people who haven't engaged in the past. Sometimes we get to the end of that call and realise it wasn't a good idea at all, so we throw it out. Sometimes we'll have a great idea, but it doesn't quite work as we expected. But sometimes we have great ideas that actually work. And those are the campaigns that end up making it into The League to be shared with our members. 

Writing our email campaigns and testing

Whenever we start a new campaign, we first write all the emails in a Google Doc. At that point, we don't worry about the technology. We can both work on the document and share comments and suggestions in real-time, which works super well if you're collaborating with others. When we're happy with our final copy, we upload the emails onto our email marketing platform and then ask our designer Parul to create the graphics for that particular promotion. We like to get things done simultaneously where we can, so we can just get the work done faster.

And then there's a really important step you don't want to miss here – testing. You want to go through and click on every link to make sure it's going where it's supposed to. Drop the price of your product to 50p/50 cents or £1/$1 and buy it – go through the process and see what it's like for your customers. (Just don't forget to put the price back up before you go live!) Create various email addresses and see what the experience is like for someone who goes through a certain path vs a subscriber who chooses a different route.  

Bathing, batching, batching!

You probably noticed that batching tasks is a big part of what we do. Even when we're running a new email campaign, for example, we'll split the tasks up. We never work on things in sequence. Take our Time Lord campaign, for example. It runs over the course of 5 days and includes several videos. The last thing you want to do is to record these videos separately and having to set up your equipment 5 different times on 5 different days! That's just not efficient and forces your brain to switch gears. What you want to do instead is to stay in the same creative zone. The same goes with writing your emails – you want to do all that in one sitting. 

Email marketing is the one activity that will grow your business!

We spend 70% of our time doing email marketing because that's the way to turn more subscribers into customers and more customers into repeat customers than doing anything else.

There's only so much you can post on social media before you start diluting the reach of your own message. So you're better off focusing on how to make your one post a day better, for example – make it more engaging so you can serve your business better. But looking at your email marketing and spending time figuring out new angles to turn people into customers will help you grow your business. Email is the one activity that will drive growth in your business, so if you're not going to make the time to do it (or have someone else do it for you), you won't be able to grow your business in the way you want.  

Subject line of the week 

This week's subject line of the week is “Sideways underpants”. This was written by Kennedy, and it was all about the fact he got himself some fancy Ted Baker underpants, only to find out that they put the tag on the side, rather than the back. And that got Kennedy all flustered and confused when getting dressed in the morning.

The lesson in that? Why make things complicated for your customers? When you create products and services, don't make life difficult for them. Build on their beliefs, what they already know, and what they're already doing. And if this isn't proof that you can find email ideas absolutely everywhere, we don't know what is! 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Writing email every day vs batch writing in one go. 

How To Plan 3 Months Of Email Content In An Afternoon. 

How Often Should You Email – Emailing More Often.

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (and an insight into our week, here at The Email Marketing Heroes) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!